


why’d you come in here looking like that

by somethingdifferent



Category: Perfect Harmony (TV)
Genre: F/M, Older Man/Younger Woman, One Shot, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 01, Title from Dolly Parton’s song, possibly who knows if we’ll get another season
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:13:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22407775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: Eat your fucking heart out, Arthur Cochran.Six months after her move to Lexington, Ginny and Arthur grab a drink.
Relationships: Arthur Cochran/Ginny (Perfect Harmony)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	why’d you come in here looking like that

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

_ MARY OLIVER _

  
She takes the job in Lexington for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with Arthur. Honest to Jesus.

There’s the money, for starters. The benefits. The fact of being in a big city (she just knows he’d roll his eyes at that, can practically hear him mimicking her in her own head, where she’s supposed to be able to escape him: “ _a big_ _city_ ”). The way she’ll finally be useful beyond a pair of hands to pour coffee, a pair of breasts to ogle when she bends over a booth to wipe up yet another spill. And did she mention the money? Because the money is a big part of it.

So it’s not like she does it to get away from Arthur. There are a lot of reasons for her to leave Conley Fork.

The problem is, of course, she’d actually decided none of those really mattered the second he threw back that glitzed out curtain and willingly sang into an autotune microphone, feather boa around his neck and looking better than he had any god damn right to look.

And then he turned his back to her and laid a big one (a fucking _big one_ ) on Adams, and she suddenly realized that maybe those reasons were enough after all.

So: Lexington.

Yippee.

Ginny settles into her new job with very few growing pains.

She finds, unexpectedly, that she likes the work, how it’s easy enough to be low-stress, but challenging enough to keep her mind active. She and Wayne make it work when it comes to visiting; neither of them can afford the kinds of lawyers who might be able to iron out details of custody, so they keep it at the easiest solution and trade Cash off on weekends. Wayne’d never admit it, she thinks, but he seems privately relieved at the sudden time-based slashing of his fatherly responsibilities. More opportunities to cultivate his snake population in peace, she supposes. 

Cash doesn’t seem too put out by the relocation, either, and that’s a relief, it really is. He is doing well at his new school, really well, _shockingly_ well. He has a special teacher he sees for something called Reading Intervention, or something similarly sinister-sounding. But the woman who takes him out of the room during his literacy block is so kind and open and sweet that, when she describes all of Cash’s skills and his progress during their conference at the start of the term, Ginny wants to cry right there in the child-sized desk she’s sitting in. 

And she barely even misses the choir, really. She finds another church quickly, more options in Lexington, and she joins the choir at that one. Even gets a solo. The director is an older woman with neck wattles and baby-soft hands, and she never uses words like _supercilious_ or _uncouth_ or _chutzpah_ , and Ginny doesn’t miss him at all.

 _Them_ at all. She means them.

  
  


Ginny sees him for the first time in six months in the parking lot of the Pick ‘n Save. She’s in town for the week, running errands, cleaning out her storage and making sure Wayne hasn’t released any possums into the attic the way he did four years ago. She’s acutely aware that she looks - not her best. There’s the rats’ nest of her blonde hair, pulled into a bun using a scrunchie she’s had since middle school, her slightly-too-loose jeans, the faded t-shirt with _SAVE A HORSE, RIDE A COWBOY_ in cowhide-pattern bubble letters stamped across her tits. 

It’s after she’s already done her shopping, slamming shut the back door of her junker car where she’s loaded her groceries. Ginny turns around and walks into - literally _into_ \- Arthur.

It is a shock, to say the least.

She stumbles back when she crashes into him, her body colliding into his like a bumper car. It’s only another heartbeat before he stabilizes her with a hand around her waist, keeping her upright. It burns her, that hand, the way she’s always imagined holy water would burn the demon out of a mortal body. Only it’s a good burn, one that she, strangely, misses the second he takes it away.

He’s the first to react. Always has to have the first word, that man. And the last. And usually all of the ones in the middle. ”Hi.”

”Oh.” Ginny squares her shoulders, lifting her chin to the air. She is a slouchy sweater, an inappropriately political remark in the workplace, a damn afternoon cup of coffee: casual as fuck. “Hey.”

Arthur seems unsettled, a bit. Off his game. He asks, the words stilted, ”How’s the new gig?”

”Good. Very good. The manager says I’m a quick learner.” A bit of bragging wouldn’t be out of line, she thinks. Her mother’d always scolded her for her vanity - _above her station_ , she’d said. As in: _well, shoot, look at our very own Virginia, little miss cosmopolitan, acting all high and mighty and above her station_. Ginny doesn’t pay it any mind; between the two of them, she’s the one who deserves to act a little uppity. Lord knows he’s been doing it enough for the both of them. “He says I’m the best he’s ever seen and, and maybe I should be doing _his_ job.”

Arthur’s eyebrows knit together, incredulous and, she notes with a twinge of embarrassment, ever-just-so disbelieving. His eyes lower to her chest, and Ginny regrets every day of her life from the day she was born, every decision that led her to this exact moment: Arthur Cochran, with his silk scarf and expensive-looking glasses, staring at a sexually suggestive cowboy joke written over her breasts. How very redneck of her, she’s sure he’s thinking. “That sounds - impressive for six months work.”

”Yeah, well,” she says, faltering a bit. “I’m an impressive gal.”

He smiles like he was trying not to, unwilling. Like she dragged it out of him. ”I know you are,” he murmurs.

Ginny swallows, shifts on her feet. Her tennis shoes are supposed to be white but they’re a light brown now, dirtied from dust and mud and everything Conley Fork. Another thing to regret, she thinks. “And how’s the choir?”

”Not quite as good without you there.” The sentence is so obviously sincere Ginny kinda hates him for it.

She purses her lips. She won’t preen at just any half-a-compliment from a pretentious, fluffy-haired man like him, that’s for damn sure. ”And - and Adams?”

He squints, mouth open for a moment in what looks like - confusion. “Adams? Why would I know about -“ She watches him grasp her meaning, his eyes shuttering for a moment before he goes on. “Oh. Well. She’s still dating that Carol guy, last Dwayne said. I can’t really remember, I wasn’t actually paying much attention.”

Oh. ”It’s Carl.”

Arthur blinks. ”What?”

”Her boyfriend’s name.” God, she sounds lame even to herself. “It’s Carl, not Carol.”

”Yeah, well, I really don’t care about his name.”

She tilts her chin up like a dare. ”Why, you jealous?”

”No.” He says it so decisively, so flat and bloodless, she knows instantly he’s telling the truth.

She opens her mouth, about to say - something. Something devastating, she’s sure, witty and intelligent that would just make him lose his little Ivy League mind for how eloquent she is, and put together, and pretty.

Instead, what comes out is: “Wanna grab a drink?”

Arthur says, “Sure, why not,” before she can call take-backsies.

And that is how she ends up in the alley behind the one bar in town he can stand to be seen in, playing tonsil-hockey with Arthur like it’s all she was put on God’s green earth to do.

She changes before she meets him at the bar. Wayne had moved into her house after she took Cash to Lexington, and, on her request, kept most of her things untouched. They’re both out for an overnight hunting trip to Wayne’s dad’s cabin that she’s pretty sure was used for a murder or two back in the day, not that she’d ever tell Wayne that. So it’s just her in her old bedroom, tearing her closet to shreds in search of some kind of ensemble.

She feels nervous for no reason, changes her outfit twenty times at least, over and over again until she’s near sick of lifting her arms above her head and shoving her hips into increasingly small waistbands.

Ginny looks in the mirror at herself in jeans, in a skirt, in a gosh dang jumpsuit, and none of it looks right. She keeps thinking, weirdly, of her body in that drag queen’s outfit, her stomach bare, skin coated in glitter and sweat. She looked damn good, and knew it, and she’d knelt down on the stage, floor under her hard and unforgiving on her knees, and she’d met Arthur’s eyes while she was down there, and she’d seen him see her, and there had been a thrill that went up her spine and made her mouth curl into a grin. And she’d looked _damn good_ , and she was so happy, and everything, and then he’d kissed Adams in front of God and everyone.

Ginny has just about gone through every single night-out ensemble she has on rotation when she spots, in the darkest, least-used corner of her old closet, a dress she has no right trying to fit into. Being a mother and all.

She ignores it at first. Then, she lets herself test the stretch of the material, a simple black fabric with forgiving enough elasticity. It’s not too long before she’s convincing herself that trying it on does not mean in any way she’s going to wear it. The neckline, she thinks, running her eyes over the reflection-Ginny, is far too low, dipping down to show a hint of cleavage, and the hemline is far too high, up past mid-thigh, inching further with every sway of her hips.

Later, she will have no idea what possessed her to wear it, bare shouldered, sans any kind of coverup for decency’s sake. She will be completely boggled at how she had the mental capacity to pull on a pair of shoes to go with it, neat little kitten heels with a bow on the toe that she got from Payless at their out-of-business sale. She will also not be completely certain how she had the wherewithal to do her makeup, as out of her mind as she was, layering on eyeliner and mascara and blush and red, red lips. The fucking _works_.

She will have no clue how this all came to pass.

But when she walks into the bar, male heads turning to watch as she struts past them, smelling just faintly, just enough to tempt, of bluebell flowers, all Ginny can think is: _eat your fucking heart out, Arthur Cochran_.

He’s already at the bar, dressed in his usual kind of thing, nursing a whiskey, when she taps him on the shoulder. The look in his eyes, when they take her in, drink her up like she is the liquid in the glass in his hands, is borderline obscene.

”Holy fuck,” he says mildly.

Ginny shifts on her heels, braces a hand on one hip. Her shoes are digging into her flesh, slicing up the back of her foot like a motherfucker, and she's pretty sure everyone can see her nipples standing at attention from the AC in the bar, but it's all so very worth it just to put that look on his face. Dumb and wrong-footed. Like he's at _her_ mercy, for once, instead of the other way around.

She takes the stool next to his, crosses her legs, tugs down the bottom of her dress for propriety's sake, and orders the same as him.

She'd forgotten, she thinks an hour into the night, how easy he is to talk to. They'd always had a strange kinship with each other, she knows she's not alone in feeling that. Conversation always flowed well between them, education and life circumstances and age doing little to prevent their ease of dialogue. 

Even with six months worth of difference between them then and them now, that is one thing that she's relieved to find hasn't changed.

Arthur tells her about the choir, about how, with her gone, he'd had to go ahead and distribute some of the solos to _voices with less than ideal pitch_. He goes on about how much harder they've been working on fine-tuning themselves as a cohesive unit, determined to give as good as they get the next chance they have to go up against Magnus. He talks about visiting Jean's grave at the one year anniversary of her passing, says it felt a little like letting her go, says it felt like more of a beginning than he'd anticipated. How he'd sat in his car and realized, maybe for the first time, that he didn't just not want to die. That, finally, he wanted to live.

Ginny listens, and she can't help the smile on her face at his words, can't help but relish every minute she gets to spend in his company again because she _missed_ this. Missed him, she realizes, more than she'd wanted to admit.

He asks about her new life in Lexington. About her job, about the petty, insignificant little details of hotel assistant management she'd ordinarily keep to herself. Ginny finds herself loosening up as she talks, as he draws stories out of her like: the first time she'd had to deal with a nude man locked out of his room ("The first time?" he asks, voice an octave too high), or the way she helped to create an entirely new organizational system for tracking room reservations, to prevent situations like the one they'd found themselves in back at Regionals.

It's the mention of Regionals that makes her think of it again. Ginny is maybe tipsy, maybe even buzzed, and so what? She's a grownup. She hears herself say, the sentence stretched just a little too thin, like a rubber band ready to snap, "What was up with that whole trip, am I right?"

Arthur furrows his brow, chin in his hand as he leans against the bar. His eyebrows give him away entirely, she thinks vaguely. Too expressive. They're dangerous, right now, his eyes dark under them as he says, "I'm afraid you're going to have to clarify that question for me."

Ginny shrugs, one strap of her dress slipping off her shoulder. She pulls it back up, watches Arthur watching the movement of her fingers as she does, watches his eyes as they run along the curve of her neck, linger on her mouth. He's not wearing a scarf, she notices abruptly; she can see the hollow of his throat when he swallows.

She's never had a thing for older men, but she wonders if maybe it's one of those weird interests that develops as you age.

"I don't know," she rasps, voice a bit hoarse from drink and overuse. "The whole two days feels like a fever dream. The bus, and then the rooms being all mixed up. Dwayne fainting, you almost killing poor Pastor Magnus, the competition being cancelled." She doesn't list Arthur in her hotel room as one of the weird things that sticks out to her, still sticks in her mind, catches her every once in a while like a fly in a trap: how he'd just strolled in like he was meant to be there, how she had been so aware of the way they were alone, alone in a different way from their usual alone. Alone with just each other and a bed in the room. "Adams's ex husband being alive and gay."

She finishes off her drink, feeling it burn down her throat. "You kissing Adams," she tacks on, as light and breezy as she can manage.

"That -" He pauses for a moment, eyeing her like she's a stubborn mule he's trying his damnedest to herd. Which is not quite accurate, she thinks. He's looking at her, she decides, more like she's a wolf in his sheep pen, like she's just slaughtered all his animals and their guts are still hanging out of her mouth and he's a little afraid he's going to be next. But in a good way. Like he almost wants to be next, like he's hoping she sinks her teeth into his jugular and rips.

She _feels_ like a wolf, sitting there in a too-short dress she hasn't worn in ten years, lips red as blood and eyes big and blue. She feels like she might like to eat him alive.

"That wasn't what you think it was," he says finally, without any elaboration. He throws a fifty on the bar top and jerks his head to the exit at the back of the bar. "Wanna get out of here?"

And she does. She really, really does.

She steps off her stool, legs closed, thighs grazing together, and follows him out.

He'd driven to the bar and she'd walked, so he tells her he'll give her a ride home. His hand is on the small of her back as he leads her through the door, and Ginny will not shiver. She won't.

"You sure you're good to drive?" She has to ask; she used to be Room Mom for Cash's class. She has a moral obligation to protect the town from dangerous, pretentious east coasters.

Arthur scoffs, his disdain crystal clear. "You sodapop girl. I'm barely tipsy."

There’s a certain way he says it, his tone, the way he’s looking at her, that makes her stop walking. He turns to look at her, hands tucked into his pockets. “I’m not a girl,” she says. She can feel her heartbeat in her throat. Can feel it between her legs, too. “I’m not a girl,” she says again, softer this time.

Arthur is quiet for a moment, looking at her. She can see the exact moment something shifts in his eyes, gets dark and intent. “No, you’re not,” he says evenly, voice pitched low, words clipped and deliberate.

Her breath is caught somewhere between her lungs and her mouth, and she’s pretty sure she’s wetter than she should be without being touched. And _whatever_ , fuck him, with his stupid crisp voice, and his stupid white hair, and his stupid glasses, and the stupid way he makes her feel special and important, and his whole stupid self. Because he’d told her she was bright and smart and talented and amazing and then he’d stupidly gone and kissed another woman in front of her and made _her_ feel stupid for even thinking - even _imagining_ -

“I didn’t kiss Adams on purpose,” he says, interrupting her thoughts.

Ginny has to process for a second before she can speak. She blinks. “Huh?”

He seems - slightly manic. A little unhinged. “The lights at drag shows are really fucking bright you know,” he says, with a bleak humor only he seems to understand. “The music is so loud. I think I got a little turned around up there. You were wearing this - thing on your head, I don’t even know what you’d call it. A headdress?”

”It was a wig,” she says faintly.

”It was unbelievably shiny. And I had on that idiotic feather boa, I mean, Jesus.”

”Arthur, I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.”

”I thought I was kissing you, okay?” The words spill out of him like it’s an accident, like he’s in the middle of a car crash, trying to steer into the skid. “I went the wrong direction, and by the time I figured it out it was too late, and - I am not explaining myself well.”

She blinks again. “What?” Her vocabulary has been pared down to single syllable utterances.

”Do you know how much I wanted to die before I met you?” It’s a question and it’s not a question, the way he asks it, but he doesn’t give Ginny any time to answer, even to catch her breath before he goes on. “All of you, Conley Fork at large, sure, yes, of course, but I mean _you,_ specifically. For the first time since Jean got sick, there was someone I cared about again, someone I wanted to talk to and see every day, and - and I _wanted_ that. I wanted all of it, I was like a monster wanting it, fuck the consequences, fuck all reason and logic. And then you had to go and find something bigger and better for yourself, and I had to turn the wrong way and ruin - everything.”

She feels herself going soft. Melting, like ice cream on blacktop in the dead heat of an Indian summer. She can’t speak, can’t say anything but his name. “Arthur.”

”I didn’t hear from you for six months,” he says, eyes trained on hers. “Not just not seeing you, I didn’t _hear_ from you. Not one text, not one phone call. You know, I have these - recordings of choir practices on my phone. Your solo. I - I listened to that sometimes.” His mouth quirks up, sad and genuine and more than a little self-deprecating. “More than I’d care to admit. Your singing, it’s so - so lovely and pure and beautiful, just like the rest of you. And I wanted all that, I guess. Still do. But you deserve someone _better_. Someone younger, not quite so cynical. Taller. Less of a walking, talking disaster.”

Ginny is - speechless. She thinks what you’d call awestruck. Dumb and wrong-footed.

They spent six months getting closer, toeing around each other like dancers on a stage, six months ignoring the other’s existence. She is a year older than she was the first time she met him, and she feels it, too, feels smarter and more capable and more confident in her abilities.

And there is Arthur in front of her telling her what she needs, like she doesn’t know it herself. Ginny is suddenly so furious with him, so viciously mad.

”You best not go telling me what I deserve, Arthur,” she says, overloud and heated. She stalks up to him, grabs him by the lapels of his _stupid_ blazer. God, she’s been wanting to rip that thing off of him since the moment she clapped eyes on him. “Or I will kick your ass.”

He only manages to get out two words, “ _Yes, ma’am,_ ” before she’s crashing her lips into his.

The kiss is open-mouthed and sloppy, teeth knocking, him biting down on her lower lip until she squeaks. It’s not gentle the way she’d thought it would be. If she thought about it. When she thought about it. It’s too desperate for that, a burst dam, a smashed bottle, needy and breathless.

She’s got one hand on the nape of his neck, the other clutching at the air while her elbow rests on his shoulder, and his hands are - everywhere. _Not appropriate for public consumption_ kind of everywhere. His fingers are trailing up her spine, holding her shoulder blades, edging up her breasts, climbing up her thighs. Ginny, in spite of her own silly little crush, never fully thought of Arthur as a man with sexual needs, or even interests. He always seemed too mature, not even his age, just that he was too intellectual for all that, too smart and east coast elite to be undone by something as crude as fornication. Yet here he is, all but groping her outside a bar in the state of Kentucky, his body practically vibrating with unreleased energy. Pent up is what he is.

He breaks away from her before she’s entirely ready, her fingers still tight around his collar, lips still parted. Her eyes are closed when he says, “What the fuck.”

She opens them, and there he is, inches away. Just looking at her, a little cross-eyed from how close his face is to hers, and half-drunk on something that can’t be only the alcohol, and nervous. She clears her throat and says, calm as anything, “I’m not going to have sex on a houseboat.”

He laughs, grins at her, and every trace of uncertainty vanishes from his features. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says.

Arthur takes her home. She’s familiar with his car, has been inside it before, and stepping into it again feels oddly comforting. Familiar. He drives home carefully, one hand on the wheel while the other rests on his leg, fingers flexing and relaxing again.

When he pulls up in front of her house, he kills the engine and sits. Ginny looks at him while he stares a hole into his windshield. There is, she’s positive, no real rationality behind her being so attracted to him. He’s right, in a lot of ways - she does deserve someone younger and less cynical and taller and not a walking disaster. But she doesn’t want that; she wants him.

Fuck everything else.

“You seem like the kind of man who needs an invitation,” she says as she gathers up her purse, hand gripping the handle of the door. “So this is me inviting you inside.”

Arthur hesitates. His eyes flicker between her face and the house; she can hear the machinery of his brain trying to figure out what question to ask. “Cash and Wayne?” It’s not even a complete sentence. If he were in his right mind, she knows, and if she’d been the one to say it, he’d already be teasing her for her sentence fragment.

She doesn’t much feel like teasing him though. Maybe later. “Out of town.”

He thinks about this for a moment. “Should I feel weird about this?”

”I don’t.”

”Good, me neither.”

”So.” Ginny jerks her hand, letting the car door click open. “You should come inside then.”

He swallows hard. “Yeah, alright,” he rasps. “That could work.” 

Arthur is barely in the house before Ginny is on him again. She can feel his arm flailing, reaching, hears him slam the door shut and feels that hand reach up to tangle in the hair at the nape of her neck while he kisses her. While she kisses him.

There’s a kind of purpose to his mouth now, a kind of assurance in the way he moves his tongue against her. Like he has given himself permission for this, like he’s allowed himself to want it.

They make it to her couch and no further, the lights not even switched on, the house around them dark and quiet.

He’s no spring chicken, and neither is she, so it’s slow-going at first, a little awkward. They have to negotiate positions, end up with him sprawled out on his back, her straddling his waist, knees tight around him. One of his hands tucks into the space between her thighs, fingers curled into her underwear, his index slipping inside her. She lets out a shaky little sound when he touches her there, half-laughing and half-choking, and Arthur lets out a different kind of noise, something that strangles into a groan in his throat. Like it is unexpected and good, her wet against his hand, like this is his version of holy.

She hisses when he peels the gusset of her panties to the side, when he starts to rock his hand into her in earnest. Her palms are pressed to his chest, hair falling into her face, eyes screwed shut, and it’s all so very ridiculous. So very young of them.

She listens to the slow click of his zipper coming down, feels him start to tease the entrance of her cunt with - with his cock, and oh lord, there he is. Hard against her, and maybe that’s a bit unexpected, too, for him, given the way he moans, open and undone.

Her dress is still on. She manages to gasp out, “Condom?” and she can feel him freeze. Which tells her all she needs to know, really.

She isn’t surprised when he says, “I don’t really carry that kind of thing around.”

Wayne is a fan of the pull-out method, as evidenced by her pregnancy scare, and so she knows there’s likely none in the house.

Ginny slides down onto him just a little, just the tip, and Arthur gasps like she’s just nailed a note she’s been working on for ages. “I’m clean,” she gets out, breathless, “you can pull out, if you want.”

She opens her eyes to him smiling, glasses still on, and she reaches out to get them off his face, fingers dropping lower to work over the buttons on his shirt. “ _If I want_? Isn’t that what got you in trouble last time?”

”You wanna do this or what?”

He nods, maybe a little frantic, and squeezes her hips. She’s managed to open his button down, and he sits up so she can tear it and his blazer off his shoulders. The second his hands are free, they’re back on her, trailing up her spine. “I’m clean, so. Yeah, I want -“ He gulps audibly, fingers twitching around the fabric of her dress. “I want to do this.”

And that’s enough for her. She sits down on him, slow, taking it easy, letting him work his way inside. Arthur looks wild, hair mussed, mouth open and wet when it catches hers. Ginny feels herself clench around him when he’s fully seated in her, fluttery and dizzy and half in love with him already. A year’s worth of half in love.

His hands tear her flimsy dress off over her head, baring her to him, and then she starts to move.

The pace she sets is slow, almost agonizingly so, rolling her hips to take him deep, ramping up to more and more. His grip on her is tight, telegraphing his restraint, the careful grasp he seems to have over himself, like if he loosens up even a little he’ll lose control completely. It feels good, his hands roaming over her, him inside her, closer than he’s ever been. It feels - natural. Easy as the conversations between them, easy as a breath of air. Every thrust as she smears herself over him, undoing all his closely-held composure, every time he hits this space inside her body, she feels the wind knocked out of her all over again. She feels his fingers getting tighter and tighter, feels herself been drawn tighter and tighter. Like the strings of a violin he’s tuning, just another instrument for him to play. 

Ginny adjusts her position, sitting up a little taller, comes down on him a little harder, and Arthur groans. She thinks maybe she’s keying him up too, maybe it’s him that’s the instrument and her the player, or him the tugged thread and her pulling him loose, unraveling him, and she’s mixing her metaphors now. Either way. Any way.

She knows what she likes, fucking him like this, knows the right way to drag her cunt across his lower abdomen so she can feel the first twinge of pleasure in her extremities. It’s the first way she ever learned to enjoy sex, using a man’s body to get herself off.

He smells like a man, like soap and the outdoors and underneath that like his expensive cologne, like himself. He feels like a man, too, her nails digging into the hair on his chest, feeling the flesh give way to hard muscle underneath. He sounds only like himself, like something specific to Arthur, his voice gone scratchy and overused, words pouring out of him on a loop, like a skipping track on a record player: _fuck_ and _oh god_ and _holy shit_ , and throughout it all her name. Her name in his voice in his throat, drawn up from his vocal cords by her. Worshipful.

It terrifies her a little, how much she likes that, how much faster it spurs her on. 

She leans in to kiss him before she comes, lips parted to breathe him in, and she finishes just like that, whimpering and keening, clenching around him wetly, trying her best to drink him all in, drink him up.

He’s looking at her, when she opens her eyes, like she’s on the stage, a golden dream performing just for him, a symphony of light and sound. He says, “Jesus,” once, the word cracked in two, and again, “Jesus,” when he sits up, lifting her up and down on his cock with ease, sliding through her like a hot knife through soft butter. He pulls out of her right before he comes, spills out onto her stomach, dripping down, and he shakes, shudders, falls to pieces underneath her, his eyes wide and dark and fixed on her face.

The house still and silent around them, the moonlight falling over their bodies like water.

Ginny stays in Lexington. She made a commitment, wants to see it through, and when she is ready to quit and head back to Conley Fork, back to her life and her friends, she’ll be older and wiser and have experience enough to do something besides waitressing. She decides on another year, maybe another six months. She goes back and forth between the two cities like that, dropping Cash off at his dad’s, going to see the group at the diner or at church, going to the houseboat at the end of the dock.

When she finally does quit, taking her experience with her, her newfound appreciation for big city living (“ _big city living_ ,” Arthur mocks, good-natured derision clear in his voice), she finds another job in Conley Fork, one with benefits and a higher salary and perks. She’s the kind of person who knows to ask for perks at her job now.

She’s the kind of person who deserves something like that, Arthur says to her once, his arm around her shoulder, voice drowsy with sleep and exertion. She deserves more than that, even. 

Ginny shrugs her shoulder, crawls that much closer to him, and lets herself take it in. All of it. She says, “You best not go telling me what I deserve, Arthur,” but there’s no heat to it, no real annoyance. She’s too tired for that, exhausted and content. The words have barely left her mouth before she is asleep, the houseboat creaking as it rocks back and forth on the lake.

(Arthur stays up a little longer than her, listening to the sound of the generator humming, flies buzzing. Its own kind of melody. His fingers tracing the soft curve of her jaw. He feels something in the middle of his chest that is like a warmth, the kind of warmth that’s all over, gentle and familiar to him even now. Even after the worst years of his life, even with the memory of Jean still a dull pain. It feels different, this new and bright thing, and it feels alright. Good. He holds Ginny in his arms and drifts off to sleep, thinking of Mozart when he was five, composing symphonies out of sounds only he could imagine.

Arthur dreams about blonde hair, music, and wolves, howling at the moon, and he wakes with the morning, to the sun shining on his face.)

**Author's Note:**

> Jesus, Jesus he says, but he’s not praying to Jesus, he’s praying to you, not to your body or your face but to that space you hold at the centre, which is the shape of the universe.[…]How does it feel to be a god… ?
> 
> \- MARGARET ATWOOD


End file.
